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Category Archives: Customer Journey

Designing advertising, services, products or doing media planning requires us to understand customers and target markets. The more we understand about behavioral preferences, attitudes, lifestyles and multiple other variables, the better we can do our jobs. Combining all sources of data: research, analytics, buyer segments in real time bidding (RTB) targeting engines, qualitative research.. its such a wealth of data that it has become too big to manage. Right now we need to be able to simplify and turn such wealth of data in to understanding and actionable priorities. This is exactly what segmenting should be all about.

Segmentation 1.0 is about creating customer understanding inside organization. The segments are actually stand alone pictures and stories about customers. These segments can’t be connected to data, which means that they steer creativity but don’t offer KPI’s, real business management tools or monitor market share changes.

Segmentation 2.0 is about more data driven and actionable segmentation. Dynamic interest grouping with online targeting tools allows you to calculate probability of click or purchase and adjust your investment/segment accordingly. Same method applies to existing customer analytics, which offers steering such as next best offer, likelihood of negative churn or the level of monetary value of different segments. It’s already about making data actionable. However, these technology specific, not market level segments.

There are two cases of Segmentation 2.0 that are now leading the way to 3.0 available in Finland. Finland is interesting because of advanced population register allowing you to do interesting solutions easier than elsewhere. However, these learnings will soon become internationalised.

The story about Finnish church is quite eye opening. Since 2000 the Finnish national church membership level has dropped from 85% to 72%. The Church is in crisis.

Church has been responsible for registering population since the beginning of organized society in Finland. Everyone who gets baptized start paying church tax as part of their national taxation. My personal church tax was more than 1000€ last year. Losing members means losses in church taxation and losing young people means losing their life time taxes calculated in billions.

Church needed tools to understand their members and ways of preventing churn. Actually the church needed to re-invent them selves. They needed segmentation. Jarmo Lipiäinen, head of Kotimaa’s sales and marketing recognized this challenge and took action. Member 360 was born. This segmentation divides people in to segments by their religious tendencies and multiple other lifestyle variables. This segment tag is attached to everyone in Finland, member or not.

Picture: Main and sub-segments

Picture: Example profile – Disconnected experience seekers

Making the segmentation applicable required tools. Jarmo Lipiäinen led the project and they created data visualization tools for parishes. You can now look at areas and understand what kind of segments are there and buy addresses to people from different segments. This allows church to speak to their members and prospects in language and perception they can agree with. Church is not just about religion, it’s a second layer of safety net for under privileged people and has multiple other roles in society . People don’t leave church only for religious reasons, they expect church to act for greater good and help people. Church stands for a lot more than God.

Since the Member 360 was introduced, now +100 parishes are using the tools and changing the way church works and is relevant to their members. Church is now rewriting their story, hiring service designers to design engagements and services for members. One experiment, internet priest with chat, was very popular among young people who were in distress but would never have reached out to church advice or someone to talk face to face. The role of church, the message and ways of being part of peoples’ lives is now changing fast. Church is learning member centricity.

Commercial 2.0 segmentation

Another initiative took place simultaneously on commercial side, Fonecta Buyer Classification. This toolkit looked at people’s lifestyles and buying preferences and was also connected to the entire population. On top of that, it is also connected to media buying tools and TNS research data. I have personally implemented multiple cases with buyer classification in travel, restaurants, hotels, telco and retail. Buyer classification has 8 main segments and sub-segments.

Budget-Concious young adults

Bargain hunters preferring finnish purhases

Parsimonious Pensioners

Brand-Focused thrill seekers

Ordinary citizens

Service-seeking couples

Family-focused quality seekers

Solid and prosperous elite consumers

The segments can be attached to your own customer database which allows you to see how many people there are in each segment, how they behave, how valuable they are, what do they buy. You can use this understanding to reach out potential new customers out there based on insights from your own data. Buyer classification allows you to connect internal and external realities with same segments and also monitor market development in numbers: who’s winning and losing what kind of customers. Business is not just simple numbers – won and lost, its very much about value too. The whole point of segmenting is about understanding where to concentrate your resources and optimize your profitability. You have to make choices, segmenting allows you to do make better decisions for those that matter most. This kind of generic segmenting attached to media buying and external data is a whole new game for business KPI’s and corporate management. It’s a possibility to connect creativity, resource allocation and business goals together

Human 360 – Next generation – segmentation 3.0

The next level is currently entering the market. Same segments are now connected to online behaviour too. You can now do online media planning by segments and use same segments in real-time-bidding. That’s a minimum standard in this day and age, but there’s more.

Member 360 and Buyer Classification were single purpose segments that could be adapted to other purposes but weren’t optimized for them. The next generation is about connecting multiple segmentation tools together:

1st You have your own core segmentation or generic segmentation that has been made for your business sector’s specific needs. This segmentation is used for business management and company wide KPI’s

2nd You have supplementary contextual segments for further insights: eg. Food, travel, technology, sports, politics, religion, fashion, housing,… you name it

To say it simply, the new generation approaches individuals holistically. People have different kind of passions and interests, capabilities and life situations. These contexts can be translated as passions and orientation. You can now approach people based on their orientation and you can analyze what kind of passions and orientations your current and potential customers have. You can also calculate scores for each segment allowing you to evaluate which approaches to your customers have strongest likelyhood of meaningful impact. Creation of business scenarios and relevant communications has never been easier.

Such insight can be used for creative planning, media planning, new service development, partner selection,.. well, designing the future of the company.

Segmentation 3.0 enable us to connect 4C’s together and create a corporate GPS for success:

Sofar Google has given a price for words with Google Adwords. This kind of segmentation will give similar price variation for people, it becomes the unifying currency in media buying. Some people have a much higher profitability potential than others. The future of media profitability will be dependent of reaching those audiences and people, advertisers are willing to pay most for. We are truly entering a new era in data driven analytics, planning, marketing, creativity and management. This development will have major impact on general management, mediabuying practices and entire creative industry. This kind of methods and tools will allow us to work miracles in unseen scale.

This development will further enhance marketing’s strategic role in management and strategy. Data will enable us to manage end-to-end processes better than ever

Author Toni Keskinen and Jarmo Lipiäinen have published “Journey with customer – from product centricity to symbiosis strategy” –book in Finnish 2013.

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B2B sales has been under major disruption due to content marketing and automation surge. I am a big believer and practitioner of these tools and methods my self and I’ve been convinced that this is the way to create naturally supporting customer journey towards a happy end and the results have proved how well it works. Now I have to admit that you can go way beyond.

Let’s consider the B2B buyers and procurement and their process:

TOP OF THE FUNNEL has to do with planning and designing the change. This work is mostly done with internal stake holders, consultants and designers. The buyers are exploring options, pondering their current solutions and how they fit with the change. This stage is really about learning and defining what would good outcome look like.

PROBLEMS:

The buyers don’t engage with vendors at this stage, although they are likely to use vendors’ content marketing materials. Most of the buyers’ time is spent searching on Google.

Buyers have hard time finding relevant content because the market is quite cluttered with generic content that doesn’t really support buyers’ process. What customers really need and look for are: Solution facts, Business Cases, White papers, Success Stories, Reviews… Tangible and concrete tools for their process. These are not easy to find!

Customer would benefit from dialogue with the vendors, but they don’t do it because they don’t want to get harassed by sales. Buyers want to drive the process and manage it efficiently. Active sales is considered disturbing.

Large vendors dominate the space, because they have resources to produce content, they have strong page ranking and their brands pull customers to their resources. This logic and dynamic will enforce status quo and buyers don’t find NEW, INNOVATIVE AND MORE COST EFFICIENT OPTIONS. These vendors are not known yet and they concentrate on their product and service development – not in content creation. Their page rank is low and Google doesn’t find them. The buyers interest is to find the best solutions but they have very hard time finding them.

When the logic of top-of-the-funnel goes like that, it influences the request for proposal (RFP). The RFP and vendor list that will get that RFP will consist of well known players and leave very little room for innovative approaches

MIDDLE OF THE FUNNEL is about engagement with 3-10 recognised players who will get the RFP. This is the first time for the buyer to allow vendors to ask questions and study options with them. Vendors have experience from multiple customers and they can reflect previous cases and their results which could potentially lead to better outcome than the one outlined in the RFP. Connecting customers challenges to vendors solutions could create a new solution, which would be the best case

PROBLEMS:

Most innovative and best solutions are not the ones to get the RFP and the customers will probably choose solutions that are established, expensive and quite similar to those that their competitors are using

The most innovative people don’t get to influence the buyers thinking and the buyers don’t get the kind of edge to their operations that would have been possible

The market logic will enforce status quo: innovative SMEs don’t get to grow and once their technology is proven the entrepreneurs will make an exit and sell their company to big players years after the development of better solutions and at that point the big players will introduce the solutions to the market and scale them. At this point buyers don’t get such benefit from their choice anymore and they will pay much more than they would have paid a couple of years earlier

I met the Founder and CEO of SpendLeadFabrice Saporito last autumn and their solution really impressed me. SpendLead is an environment where the optimal buying process has been made possible and allows the most innovative players to engage with buyers early. The founders have their history in procurement and they have developed a dream environment for the buyers to realise the optimal buying process!

SpendLead founders have their history in major companies buying processes, which has allowed them to get these buyers in. There are already major companies procurement departments which have combined buying power worth more than 200 Billion/year using SpendLead which gives the service a unique value proposition. eg. BBC

The service has been built around these buyers interests, which means that they have embraced it and adopted it rapidly. It’s now time for sellers and marketers to take advantage of this possibility. How it works for marketers promoting their services in SpendLead? You publish exactly what the customers are looking for:

And you get tools to do you engagements and lead generation:

For an SME this environment gives full toolkit, allows very easy publication and enables anonymous engagements with buyers who want to learn more at the top of the funnel. This will speed up and strengthen the innovative solutions adoption. This environment magnify solutions and their impact, not brands. That’s why I think that SpendLead can disrupt the market logic over the next couple of years. The service is completely free for buyers and the business model is based on leads. Their pricing is very affordable, 1,99USD/lead and it will probably disrupt the lead generation market also in case of bigger brands. At least it is great way for SME’s to scale their sales reach. I don’t think that big companies can afford to neglect this kind of player in case their buyers adopt the service.

SpendLead is definitely worth trying and their thinking is solid. I’m really interested in seeing how this kind of disruptive new service will change the way we do B2B selling and buying!

In case you have experiences about customer dialogue and sales process inside SpendLead I’d be very interested in hearing actual experiences from both buyers and marketers point of view

A NEW BRAND OF MARKETING: The 7 Meta-Trends of Modern Marketing as a Technology-Powered Discipline

“The modern CMO and marketer can no longer be just a brand ambassador, they must also have a deep understanding of marketing technology. Scott Brinker helps the reader to understand how technology can be used for both successful marketing strategy and execution.”
– Jonathan Becher, CMO, SAP

It frames the epic collaboration underway between marketers and technologists, set against the backdrop of two seismic shifts in marketing today:

First, how marketing is taking over the business. We can debate functions and org charts. But in a hyper-connected digital world, everything that a business does — the entire customer experience that it delivers, from the very first touchpoint onward — is now the scope of marketing.

Second, how technology is taking over marketing. Marketing has more software entwined in its mission today than any other profession in the history of computing. Leveraging these capabilities requires new approaches to marketing strategy and management — as well as new kinds of talents within the marketing team, such as marketing technologists.

These two massive shifts are the result of 7 “meta-trends” — each of which has dramatically changed the nature of marketing. And collectively, they have created a whole new brand of marketing:

From traditional to digital

From media silos to converged media

From outbound to inbound

From communications to experiences

From art and copy to code and data

From rigid plans to agile iterations

From agencies to in-house marketing

At only 40-pages, this is probably the shortest marketing book you will ever read. But if you want to understand the context in which marketing has become a technology-powered discipline, I hope it may be one of the most helpful.

Reviews of A NEW BRAND OF MARKETING

“As modern marketers, we have to embrace technology in order to stay relevant. But how? In A New Brand of Marketing, Brinker dives into the shifting digital landscape and illustrates how businesses can transform their marketing to be more inbound, and ultimately more effective, with tech-driven strategies.”
– Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot

“Scott Brinker nails it with his articulation of the 7 meta-trends that have fundamentally altered — as well as empowered — marketing. Technology now fuels the marketing discipline, where science and art come together to build a brand based upon customer experiences, where the interactions are more inbound than outbound and truly global in nature.
– Amy D. Love, CMO, Appirio

“Scott has penned a veritable treatise on the subject of marketing in the digital age of digital. In this pithy work, Scott captures the key meta-trends that will define how all marketing is done in a world of technology enablement and customer empowerment. The punch line: read it.
– Terence Kawaja, CEO, LUMA Partners

“The leading meta-trends transforming and growing business at the convergence of marketing and technology by Scott Brinker. This short story is a simplified illustration of modern marketing, disrupted and transformed by the growing evolution and impact of technology, the modern the face of marketing.”
– Mayur Gupta, Global Head, Marketing Technology, Kimberly-Clark

“A New Brand of Marketing articulates the why of marketing’s fundamental changes over the past 20 years better than any book or blog post I’ve ever read. Scott, in his succinct and thoughtful voice, showcases the how necessary to navigate to a healthy and successful marketing organization as only a thought leader and expert marketing leader such as himself can. A must read for every marketer.”
— Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO, Mindjet

With A New Brand of Marketing, Scott has put traditional agencies on notice. Clients are evolving faster than agencies and their organizational models. A New Breed of Agency is needed, with an operating system that has Scott’s meta trends at its kernel. Every marketer and marketing technologist should memorize this short read. Gold!
— Sheldon Monteiro, CTO, SapientNitro

“Scott has provided a great overview of the trends that are driving the long-term changes in how marketers do their job and the role that technology plays. This book provides much-needed context to help marketers and marketing technologists build long-term strategies that will let them thrive regardless of what comes next. Better still, he does it in a clear, enjoyable writing style.”
– David Raab, Principal, Raab Associates

“Scott has brilliantly framed the dimensions along which marketing has transformed — and where it is headed in the future. This should be required reading for everyone in the industry.”
– Dharmesh Shah, CTO, HubSpot; Author, Inbound Marketing

“Anything is possible when marketing and technology collide. Brinker’s A New Brand of Marketing concisely captures the fundamental shifts driving the most transformative time in marketing history. Read it, share it, and use it to accelerate change within your organization.”
– Paul Roetzer, CEO, PR 20/20; Author, The Marketing Agency Blueprint

“One of the most important marketing books I’ve read in some time — short and concise, but intensely relevant for today’s marketers. This is a manifesto for math marketers out there, and perhaps a final warning and blueprint to those who haven’t yet are the transition (but will soon be extinct unless they do).”
– Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing

“When asked, ‘What’s your biggest challenge?’ — most marketing executives reply that it is staying on top of the constant and rapid change that shapes the current environment of marketing. While I don’t know of any book that can solve that problem, Scott Brinker’s new book superbly sets the conversation in which that challenge can be met head-on and managed.”
– Ric Dragon, CEO, DragonSearch; Author, Social Marketology

“Scott has put together 7 extraordinarily insightful trends that every CMO and CIO need to understand. He calls marketing a ‘technology-powered discipline.’ And while I might rather call today’s technology a ‘marketing-powered discipline’ — Scott would forgive me for fighting for top billing. It’s just a wonderful, insightful, and just plain entertaining read. This is one that every marketer and the technology teams they work with should read together.”
– Robert Rose, Chief Strategist, CMI; Author, Managing Content Marketing

“Scott Brinker does a great job articulating a compelling and exciting opportunity for today’s marketers. The 7 meta-trends that Scott breaks out are accurate, digestible, and actionable. I suggest all marketers move this onto their must read list!”
– Sam Melnick, Research Analyst, CMO Advisory Practice, IDC

“I love this book. It brilliantly and simply explains some of the most important drivers underlying marketing today. Scott lays out the facts, using data to explain what’s happening in the world of business as it touches marketing and technology.”
– Michael Krigsman, Strategy Advisor & Analyst, Host of CxOTalk

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I just found Mr. Kfir Pravda’s article “Revenue attribution 101” Mr. Pravda’s key question was: How do you measure revenue attribution – money and profitability for marketing activities. He had split the revenue attribution measurement according to touchpoint sequence from last to first and combined as customer journey. I agree with his measurement frame and guidelines. It’s a great article. I would recommend reading it.

Mr. Pravda’s article got me thinking about how do I actually approach this subject in my planning and implementation process.

First: I always start attribution modeling from owned channels

What is their capacity to bring traffic and visitors (eg. stores and online)?

What is their capability to convert recognized customers?

What do people actually look in to and buy?

Who are the customers actually – what kind of attributes, motives, interest contexts etc. do they share?

Once you have your own channel conversion, increased owned media demand generation impact and marketing automation tuned effective for the first time purchase t’s time to get more people interested.

Second: With the knowledge about contexts, customers and motives that generate interest and traffic it’s rather easy to recognize interfaces and channels that enable you to present a relevant and appealing messages for customers. This first touch planning is very much data directed iterative testing and learning process. What ever works, you scale up and automate in any given channel from online to direct marketing, telesales, face-to-face sales or advertising. I do prefer channels that I can measure direct ROI from, but I’ve also seen how media marketing has created stronger customer relationships and willingness to pay premium. These secondary KPI’s are about brand attributes, preference and willingness to pay premium.

Third stage is about learning and planning how to increase customers’ basket size, purchase frequency and expand customer’s buying behavior to more than one category. This stage is about using marketing automation technology in order to create service automation customer care programs for great customer experience and sales.

This process is completely founded on customer journey analysis and understanding in an omni-channel environment.

Customer Purchase Journey by definition is the customer’s journey from existing life experiences to initiation, cross-channel consideration and purchase. Customer Journey then continues to using the product or experiencing the service, re-purchases and loyalty or attrition. This article concentrate on Customer decision-making journey to purchase.

Marketing research often looks into the future perspective and ask about awareness, top-of-mind, preference and shortlist of potential brands. The challenge about researching future is that people are quite bad at acting according to their own intentions. Habits, convenience and instincts drive behaviour to unexpected directions that are difficult to predict by research. These studies also often miss a major point. They ask customers which brand they prefer and make them choose one, and consequently fail to recognize the fact that people might have only brand options, not a specific preferred brand.

Example: In a Telco case we learned that 76% of the customers had a pool of options but they didn’t have a specific preferred brand. This result means that most of the market is floating. People only have options and consider brands as equally good. When the time comes the best/ first/nearest/most conveniently available deal will win regardless the brand as long as the brand is within the pool of options.

How to prepare for Customer Journey mapping:

Before you start designing the research or make any assumptions, establish the foundation. You can establish the foundation with two key factors:

a) Is the category or brand in high intensity position: high involvement, -investment or –interest product or service? Heinz ketchup would be in the low-end, buying a car would be in the high-end. The purchase intensity stands for the depth of consideration and willingness to make an effort to make a considered choice. If the product or service has low intensity, there will be no actual journey but rather spontaneous and habit driven behaviour. High intensity decision-making on the other hand could last a long time and have a lot of touch points in variety of surroundings.

b) What is the brand’s status in customer’s mind compared to competitors? In case the brand is well-known and preferred brand, the customer journey will have completely different dynamics compared to less known challenger. The key question is; “is the brand being sold or bought”? In case the brand is bought, you can approach the mapping in order to find ways of optimizing conversion rate. For such case tactical marketing will also generate much stronger impact than in case of a brand with less demand. In case the brand is sold, you should find ways how to break into customer’s consideration and prove your brand better than competitors. In case the brand is sold, the burden of proof is on the brand’s shoulders and you need to find ways how to guide customers away from the path leading to market leader purchase.

You can find data for creation of foundation from the company’s brand tracking research, market share report, online analytics and Google Adwords tool or Google Trends tool. When looking for foundation intelligence, consider how the category behaviour reflect the two foundation factors, how the brand in question and it’s competitors position against each others. Draw a map with all competing brands on it (X-axis: Activity share seller vs. buyer, Y-axis: Intensity level. Eg. Heinz = bottom right corner = no or very little advertising, strong sales & market share, low intensity) Do the preparation phase well and you will have a rather good idea about what is happening in the customer behaviour dynamics. Analytics can give very good answers to “what” –questions. However, you need to make in-depth-interviews in order to find answers to “why” –questions.

Discovery phase:

Once you have a high level view on the market place and a lot of “what” ideas to guide you, prepare to make in-depth-interviews with customers and get “why”-answers from them. Choose customers who have made their choice recently. In case of high intensity purchases, people can remember their experiences for a couple of months, in case of low intensity purchases – interview them instantly at the point of purchase or walk them thru the store with the customer again using the customer as a guid for a tour and let the customer tell you what he experienced, noticed or thought along the way (the same approach can be used in online buying by recording customer’s actual journey thru website). This is different from mystery shopping, because the emphasis is on the customer, not on the store personnel.

The point of in-depth-interview is to analyse the customer’s lived experiences with out others’ interference. This information is only available from customers, because you need the full view across all brands, information and shopping touch points in the category – not just the brand you are doing the mapping for. Ask your customer to tell the whole story from what ever got him interested in buying to purchase. Here’s the process:

Who is the customer? Get to know his lifestyle and connection to category/brands

What made the customer interested (initiation)?

What and where did something happened that gave the impulse to initiate consideration: commercial act by the brand or it’s competitors or an event that made customer interest (eg. Moved to new apartment, new need etc.)?

Did the customer have a preferred brand in the beginning or not? Were there other options the customer considered?

How long was customer’s consideration and learning time before purchase?

In which channels the customer interacted with your and competing brands in each phase?

Did the customer do all phases and what was the main driver and meaning of each of them? Did the customer skip stages? (In case you want to quantify results later, always define stage and ask if the customer did it before asking about it’s content and channels. Skipping stages is quite common)

What was the customer’s experience in each engagement like? Which brands performed well? Why?

Something led to decision, what was it and in which touch point did it occur?

What did the customer eventually buy?

What was the reason for choosing the specific brand over others?

What was the second best option or was there one? Why did it lose?

In case the customer chose competing brand, why did he not buy the one in focus?

Would customers buy again if they had a choice? What is different brands’ Net Promoter Score Index? What were they satisfied for? Was there dissatisfaction?

I would recommend making at least ten in-depth-interviews/category in order to learn about customers’ behaviour and motives. You should interview both won and lost customers and totally concentrate on their experience and point of view. In case you can study customers who left the brand you are making the customer journey mapping for, you will also find out where the brand failed and how the competitors caught the brand’s customers’ attention. In some markets for example outbound sales is an important influencer which has major impact on behavioral dynamics. While interviewing, keep your mind open. Don’t narrow your consideration, but consider all experiences and thoughts the customers have had. From customer’s point of view marketing, pricing, product design, convenience etc. are all relevant issues. As an outcome you will come across things you can influence and those you can’t. However, you need to understand customer’s behaviour and consideration holistically.

Analysis

This approach to interviews, discovery and analysis goes by the name “interpretative phenomenological analysis” (IPA) in psychology. Once you have the interviews, you can create an analysis about their journey and visualize it. The best way to do this is by visualizing each journey separately. Concentrate especially on chain of events, customer’s journey from one touch point to next, motives and contents steering the customer. Conscious cross-channel purchase journey is most likely in case of high intensity purchase. The behaviour dynamics differ between products, service ranges and between same brands in same category. In your analysis you can divide customer behavior in three major types:

Journey Driven people: These people take pleasure in getting to know their options, their qualities and comparing. They are also more likely to share their experiences in social media as they consider themselves as experts. People who are prepared to make detours and a longer journey require a different approach than destination driven ones and they don’t react on offers as easily, unless they have already got to know their options well in advance.

Journey Driven People are often early adopters. They are especially important in case you are launching new product. They are interested in the products and their qualities. You need to support their needs and change or influence their attitude in order to break in to their awareness. As they search and compare, you need to be able to justify to them why your solution would suit them and guide them to decide and purchase your product/service. These people really consider their user experience and share recommendations in case your performance is beyond expectations. Supporting their needs helps you perform better with other people representing different behaviour type.

Destination driven people: These people don’t really care to learn about products by themselves. They make rapid decisions based on their priorities (e.g. always the best, always the cheapest) or rely on 3rd party recommendations such as test results. An offer for test winner product is an effective proposition for them and generate rapid sales.

Destination driven people also need to be influenced at “need and attitude” -level in order to create better awareness of your offering and it’s qualities. However, this is more about leveraging past reviews and feedback from journey driven people. Destination driven people are more likely to be influenced by e.g. Magazine or social media reviews on your product or other independent sources of information. With such support you can just concentrate on tactical advertising in order to encourage decision and purchase making. Destination driven people are interested in the user experience and reviewing their own experience to others.

Slow movers, public opinion driven people: (also habitual or insignificant purchases). These people don’t take risks. Only after most of the others have already accepted and favoured a certain product or service will they follow. Same behaviour also describes the purchase process of less significant products, like toilet paper or other habitually purchased products. People don’t really pay attention to what they buy; they just buy it like they’ve done before.

Public opinion driven people accept your offering when it’s widely used and they are completely certain that choosing your offering has no risk what so ever. It’s all about tactical advertising, retail promotions and encouraging purchase. They are not likely to share their opinion to others or recommend your products or services actively.

In different product and service categories differences are dramatic. It’s easy to think in terms of travelling. A motorcyclist takes longer and slower routes because the journey is the major part of the travelling experience in itself. On a family holiday the same person takes a direct flight to an all-inclusive hotel. Although this is the same person, different context and different motives lead into completely different behaviour. The point of this analysis is to really understand how people behave in your category towards different brands and find out what is required from you in order to perform better.

Along with behaviour type, analyse:

What kind of commonalities and shared phenomena, motives, contexts, choice criteria and channels can be found from customer’s behaviour and what was there that you need to quantify or find more information about. Pay attention to the chain of events.

Which of the touch points the brand can control, which you just need to influence

What was the customer experience like in competitors different touch points along own ones. Can you learn something from them?

Pull all your findings together and have a workshop to discuss about these findings and find out how the internal organization experience these findings and what knowledge do they have about them. Get people who work in direct customer interfaces involved.

Also discuss, which ERP, CRM, online analytics or other systems are currently capturing data about the customers? This information can help you further and let you make a decision whether you continue by doing data analysis and workshop or do you need to quantify the results with larger research. I would recommend research every one or every two years in order to map out how the market place works from customer’s point of view and what you can learn from competitors’ practices or whether you can find opportunities for growing market share

Why this approach to mapping and analysing customer journey is imperative

In many cases your own campaign could actually sell competitors’ products. Also, in many cases the customer journey is full of conflicting interests. In case you only analyse the one brand’s journey you will completely lose sight on category dynamics. Here’s an example about my Garmin buying:

There was a home electronics store advertisement promoting TomTom navigator for 75€ with European maps. I went to buy it, but the store salesman told me there was an error in the ad and that price only included Western European maps. He showed me the product with Full European maps with 105€ price. Next to it was Garmin Nüvi, which had exactly same price. I asked if there was any differences between the two and the salesman told Garmin had better battery life. I bought Garmin. Let’s look at the interests of different players:

Me, the customer:

I was very happy, although I paid 40% more than intended but 105€ wasn’t a problem eventually. I was highly price-oriented customer who was looking for ”good enough” solution and was not interested in more advanced solution or bigger screen. Because of the basic functionality needs I had I was also not interested enough to look in to product specifications online, product reviews or discussion forums. This product will get the job done anyway. I was a perfect example of destination driven buyer. At home, the product exceeded expectations. It had much more functionalities than I was expecting. They had minor meaning compared to the basic functionality, none of them was more important than the battery life, but it was a positive surprise.

Gigantti store:

Closed 40% more sales than I had intended to spend. The experience about the store was positive and the sales person’s advice was good, which means that the store will get more money from me later on. Was their error in the ad intentional? Probably not but they should still analyse how the error influenced their GPS navigator sales in general. What did customers come to buy and what did they actually walk out with?

TomTom:

Complete failure. The brand might have made a special deal for the campaign resulting change in price image. After reading that leaflet customers think, that you can get TomTom with European maps at the price of 75€. It easily becomes the market standard because of nationwide advertising campaign. You are making a bad deal if you pay more for it. Price/value ratio sounds perfect but actually it wasn’t real because of the error in the ad. That’s ok if you go to Gigantti and they tell you about the error. If you don’t you just expect that TomTom’s are now cheap. It’s most likely that TomTom does some kind of post campaign analysis and comes to completely wrong conclusions unless they understand how the purchase dynamics in the low price category GPS really works and how their campaign influenced customer behaviour in general.

Garmin:

Great success. Garmin did nothing but made a deal anyway. Well, I had positive image about Garmin in advance and the sales person just gave me the last defining fact that led to decision to buy Garmin. Now that Garmin closed a deal with me and got me registered, I am quite likely to buy other stuff on top later on. Was Garmin’s success intentional? In reality the sales person’s advice could have been founded on her own perception or Garmin had analysed the differences between brands and intentionally launched training for retail sellers which states that their battery life is better than TomTom’s. How much longer? No idea. It never came up.

Conflicting interests are very important to understand. In another case a laptop brand sold 50% more than their preference rate would suggest. That also was because the sales people preferred that specific brand.

Here’s how Audi did in case of B2B car leasing deals:

Preference 14%

Alternative to 26 %. Altogether Audi was considered by 40% of all buyers

Audi sold 11,2% that is 2,8% below preference which means 80% conversion

Audi was the most sold brand but was also most often the 2nd best and had lowest conversion rate in the market. Wolkswagen sold 119%, Volvo 117% and Ford 196% compared to preference. Even if you would be number one in sales, you could still be the one losing most.

There is one more thing to consider: Specialist & aggregator influence. In B2B especially customers are using professional consults and agents to compare and make recommendations. The customer journey behaviour and needs of an agent are very different from individual buyer’s needs. In B2C businesses comparison services and aggregators like Hotels.com and eBookers have similar significant influence. In case there are such actors in your category, analyse their journey separately.

Business Dynamics Score (BDS)

In case you quantify your results with larger sample you can calculate Business Dynamics Score.

Those who preferred you originally > How many did you keep?
Those who preferred your competitor > How many did you win?
Those who had no preference > How many did you win?

When you compare won-kept-lost results between brands you can really see how different brands are performing. I would recommend calculating BDS from all market players in order to learn about differences in channel efficiency. This figure will give you very good understanding on how behaviour from one brand to another differs and what you need to do in order to perform better. Such insight has great impact on media- and communications strategy.

Constructing Market Flow

In case you have the larger sample, you can construct entire market flow across stages, channels, motives and behaviour types from spontaneous purchases to considered ones on one page view. This single page view will help tremendously in understanding what kind of factors influence market success most and how for example strong retail strategy performs against strong online emphasis. In one case we found that spontaneous buying was quite strong and outbound calls represented 15% of total market sales. However, we were surprised to learn that more than half of customers buying in the category initiated because of outbound call, didn’t do one stop shopping, but instead started cross-channel consideration journey ending up in a purchase from some other channel.

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When a customer initiates conscious consideration and buying, he’s often the one who’s active. He’s making searches online, reading ads, discussing about his interest with friends and family, reading product reviews, asking questions from professionals and stores, visiting several websites and outlets, asking opinions and advice. Majority of this behaviour can be analyzed online or with research.

When the customer initiate this journey he’s in charge. At least that’s how he feels. That needs to be taken for granted. He makes decisions. While he’s in charge, he’s being influenced by media, marketing, brands, professionals, sales people,… There is an exception though, in case it is possible for you to earn a position as a trustworthy and respected specialist, then you can sell with specialist recommendations. This approach to sales works much better than hard selling. In the end the customer is quite likely to buy something he could not have imagined before actually entering the journey. He does the decision eventually and your role is to influence the choices he makes if you know how to do it.

Chain of events > you need to know and understand the people flow across channels and touchpoints

Competing & neutral touchpoints > You need recognize and understand also the impact of your competitors touchpoints. Your channel capasity to convert customers is the key and you must understand that the customer is not visiting your touchpoints only, but your competitors too. Increasing your conversion and business dynamics score is the ultimate goal of the entire Customer Journey work

The mapping of the customer journey is composed of he following parts:

0. Customers: Who are they? How do they live? What kind of life style and life stage are they in their own lives? What is their socioeconomic status like? How can you reach them? What kind of behavioural conventions their everyday life has in the context of your offering? What do they value? What kind of solution would they appreciate? Who are your most valuable customers? How do customer profiles differ from one product category to another? What kind of potential can be found from your existing customers from cross-selling point of view? What kind of people keeps your company in business now and where can you find growth potential?

Do you have control of the touch point or does a partner manage it? At what point of a customer journey is the customer getting involved with a certain touch point? What can you do in that moment and what are your goals and KPI’s? Can that specific touch point result in to an acquisition or do you need to direct the customer further? What kind of roles a single touch point has and how can you make certain all roles are played out right along the customer journey?

2. Service moments and context

What are the most likely contexts in which the customer engages with the touch point? What is he trying to do? How can you help him achieve that? How is that done? How could it make your product or service look more appealing or at best, a most likely option?

3. Motivation and drivers

Are the customers reaching out for you or is it the other way around? In what kind of mindset does a customer engage with your brand? What could drive him further instead of abandoning your brand? What are the conventions and customs in your business and how could you exceed customer’s expectations by breaking them? Are there other companies that have a similar logic to yours and could you implement their approaches, which already have a proven logic?

4. Decision making process

What is the customer’s decision-making process like? Is he doing it himself or using a consultant or services for comparison? Are there predictable qualities in customer’s selection process that would enhance your capability to adapt your organisation to the customer’s behaviour with right content, value proposition or services? How does the customer move from one stage to the next?

5. Triggers and Moments of truth (initiate/choose/drop/buy/attrition)

Where and at what point are the most important moments of truth defining the majority of your business success? What triggers them to decide or act according to your will? Can you trigger customer behaviour? How can you do that most effectively and which kind of approach result in best outcomes? Why do you win and what do your competitors do better if you lose business to them? How can you outperform your competitors’ actions?

6. Post-purchase satisfaction and recommendations

Would customers buy again if they had a choice? What is your Net Promoter Score Index? What were they satisfied about? Was there dissatisfaction? How can you improve your customer experience in order to earn higher opinion? Do your customers discuss about your product online or face to face? What are they saying? Are they endorsing your brand? Could you use their endorsement for others who are still considering it?

7. Business systems, research and analytics

What kind of information your systems currently store from your customers’ behaviour? How could this data help you serve your customers better and create systematic methods for continuous development of your company? Consider ERP, CRM, Online analytics, Contact Center systems, email communications, customer satisfaction and voice of customer studies, reclamations, customer feedback and ideas for improvement etc. How does the infrastructure combine different data sources and make it available for people working in customer interfaces? Do you have marketing automation software in use that could adapt your operation and communications to individual customer’s behavior and store customer’s online engagements and interests that enable realtime action and individual customer care models?

Here are a couple of visualisations I find particularly informative and inspiring: